SA to lead analytics globally

A NEW predictive analytics hub in South Australia tracking energy from the molecules in the ground to end use will help gas market transparency amid the east coast gas crisis and enable analyst scrutiny of companies at a level not seen before, Energy News has learned.

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Core Energy Group has spent the past two years collecting and cleansing publicly available data streams from every production source in Australia, and launched the Internet of Things Mining and Energy cluster (IoT EMR) last week with the Australian Information Industry Association.

IoT MER general manager Steven Travers, an oil and gas lifer who spent a decade in Aberdeen before running Baker Hughes' operations in Adelaide, told Energy News that the hub would be a "step change" even above the project and market analysis provided by a myriad of consultancies today.

"We believe it's a global first. We believe that some have set up things that have scratched the surface, but nobody has done anything this ambitious, to this level of detail," he said.

"Operators can look at everything from a basin and field standpoint and compare it to their own production data and figures, and to their peers.

"It gives analysts a deeper understanding of a holistic basin play or with an entire energy system, so they can see with a different lens when they're talking about energy companies and what value they're putting to them for buy, sell or hold, comparing it to what the company has said.

"You can also look at it from a commercial standpoint, where contracts and sales are going."

With Australia very much a long-term contract based market, particularly on the gas side, the hub would allow operators to view new opportunities, particularly with both the Moomba and Wallumbilla gas hubs expected to become busier over the next two years given the gas crisis on the east coast.

The Adelaide analytics hub also provides the ability to work with that data to see greater upside on the commercial value.

With the Australian Energy Market Operator repeatedly calling on Queensland's LNG producers to open up their gas supply data as SA and Victoria risk supply shortfalls in coming years, Travers said the new hub would give more clarity around those molecules.

"It's collating all the information that's in the system and bringing it into a single conduit so anybody can work through it themselves, and they can add on engineering insight or analytics, or take that data to a separate expert," he said.

"People can zoom around the entire system and have a look at essentially what's in the ground, what's coming out of the ground, where it's going when it gets to system, where it gets to surface, how it's being distributed, what's going overseas, what's staying here, what's going into the various industrial and power generating applications and where it's going after that."

Opportunities right through the supply chain mean the centre is expected to generate more than $100 million in revenues within two years and $500 million within five, with the capacity to employ hundreds of people well into the future.

Core Energy group executive chairman Paul Taliangis, who headed up Santos' corporate planning team eight years, said SA had the potential to play a lead role as the world, and particularly the energy sector, entered an "exciting era" of predictive analytics and associated technologies globally.

The centre will collaborate with key research bodies and universities nationally and globally focusing on optimising the mix of gas, oil, coal, renewable energy and other sources to deliver reliability and affordability across the value chain, beyond and to a greater detail than what the Commonwealth is trying to achieve in response to the gas crisis.

"The management of advanced analysis of data and information represents one of the largest technology opportunities globally," Travers said.

"The form of this program will enable us to tap into the best ideas and capabilities and develop them to their fullest, through a genuinely collaborative platform and environment."